European Championship Stories; 1992, new Europe, old enmities

The four years building up to Euro 92 had been the most politically traumatic that Europe had seen since 1945. Small wonder, then, that this should encroach into the tournament itself.

This, perhaps, was not the new Europe that the leaders of the continents nations had envisaged when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November 1989. The years between the European Championships of 1988 and 1992 were the most politically tumultuous across the continent since the end of the Second World War.

At varying points over the course of those four intervening years, the geopolitics of the entire continent had been upturned. Entire countries vanished from the map. whilst others sprung up in their place. The political ideology and practices of the particular form of bureaucratic socialism as practiced to the east of the Iron Curtain was swept from power. And, by and large, this was achieved peacefully.